My productivity has diminished lately, partly because it’s that time of the semester when other tasks, like marking, take up much of my time, and partly because it’s that time of the winter when I’m particularly exhausted and anxious for spring to arrive. The winters here are long, and this one has been very cold, and I haven’t been able to walk at all because of an injured tendon in my foot. “These injuries take a long time to heal,” my podiatrist said, and he was right. So perhaps this wasn’t the best time to tackle Michel de Certeau’s abstruse theoretical text, The Practice of Everyday Life. It had to be done, though, since I’ve been accepted to a conference in Ireland, and the paper I will give is supposed to draw on de Certeau’s discussion of space, place, and walking. I’d read his chapter on walking in the city before, but that was years ago, and I had forgotten what he had to say about it. Besides, I hadn’t read the theoretical framework in which that chapter is situated and felt that I needed to do that work. So here I am, two weeks later, sorting through my notes and trying to figure out what to say about this difficult, poetic, and insightful book—or at least the sections that I read, since I stopped reading after the chapters on walking and on place, since those are my primary interests for this project. I have to warn you: The Practice of Everyday Life is a complex book, and in trying to track those complexities, this post is going to be quite long—perhaps longer than anyone might care to read. It’s actually more than complex: it is by turns insightful and confusing, and the repetitiveness of this summary reflects the repetitiveness of de Certeau’s text. After all, the fourth or fifth time he says something, it might be (and sometimes is) significantly different from the first iteration, and I want to make sure I track those subtle (or not-so-subtle) shifts in his argument.
In the preface to the English translation, de Certeau states that he is interested in “a science of the relationship that links everyday pursuits to particular circumstances” (ix). Those “everyday pursuits” include things like shopping, cooking, and walking, and de Certeau sets himself the next-to-impossible task of considering the circumstances in which such activities in all of their variety and complexity function as forms of ideological or political resistance. But those activities constitute more than just forms of resistance: “only in the local network of labor and recreation can one grasp how, within a grid of socio-economic constraints, these pursuits unfailingly establish relational tactics (a struggle for life), artistic creations (an aesthetic), and autonomous initiatives (an ethic)” (ix). De Certeau’s goal for this book, he continues, is to assist readers in uncovering for themselves “their own tactics, their own creations, and their own initiatives” (ix). In other words, de Certeau writes in his lengthy general introduction, he wants “to indicate pathways for further research” (xi). In order to achieve that goal, it will be necessary for “everyday practices, ‘ways of operating’ or doing things” to “no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity,” and for “a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity,” to “make it possible to articulate them” (xi). De Certeau isn’t interested in those who produce cultural products, but rather in those who use or consume them (and thereby produce culture in a different way). “The purpose of this work,” he writes,
is to make explicit the systems of operational combination (les combinatoires d’opérations) which also compose a “culture,” and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term “consumers.” (xi-xii)
“Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others,” de Certeau continues, and it’s this poaching that seems to particularly interest him, especially in his later discussion of the perruque or wig, a form of resistance in which workers use company time and/or resources to do things for themselves (25-26).
The Practice of Everyday Life grew out of a study of popular culture, and three aspects of de Certeau’s research into that area, he writes, are important. First, he’s interested in usage or consumption—what a cultural consumer “makes” or “does” while consuming cultural products. Such making or doing is a production, but it is a hidden one, “because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of ‘production’ (television, urban development, commerce, etc.) and because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves ‘consumers’ any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems” (xii). The consumption of cultural products is devious and dispersed; it is everywhere; and it manifests itself “through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order” (xii-xiii). What is necessary is an analysis of the manipulation of such products by users who are not their makers, in order to “gauge the difference or similarity between the production of the image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization” (xiii).
For de Certeau, the model of this “secondary production” is language—particularly the distinction semioticians make between langue, the entire complex of vocabulary and rules of grammar, and parole, individual acts of enunciation or speech. The construction of such utterances “operates within the field of the linguistic system; it effects an appropriation, or reappropriation, of language by its speakers; it presents a present relative to at time and place; and it posits a contract with the other (the interlocutor) in a network of places and relations” (xiii). Those four characteristics of the speech act (which de Certeau derives from the semiotician Émile Benveniste) can be found in many places, including walking (xiii). The parallel between the use of cultural products and speech suggests, he continues, that users make “innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules. We must determine the procedures, bases, effects, and possibilities of this collective activity” (xiii-xiv).
De Certeau’s also intends to investigate the “miniscule” and “quotidian” resistances to power and discipline that are constituted by these uses of cultural products, the “ways of operating” that “form the counterpart,” for consumers, “of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order” (xiv). According to de Certeau, “These ‘ways of operating’ constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production” (xiv). The goal of this aspect of de Certeau’s research is “to perceive and analyze the microbe-like operations proliferating within technocratic structures and deflecting their functioning by means of a multitude of ‘tactics’ articulated in the details of life,” and “to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in these nets of ‘discipline.’ Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of an antidiscipline which is the subject of this book” (xiv-xv). If you note the influence of Michel Foucault here, you are correct; in some ways, de Certeau is an enthusiastic (if sometimes incorrect) disciple of Foucault’s work, and The Practice of Everyday Life would be unimaginable without the theoretical framework Foucault provides in his writing.
In addition, de Certeau wants to look at the formal structures of these practices of consumption in order to uncover their logic through two kinds of investigations: “The first, more descriptive in nature, has concerned certain ways of making that were selected according to their value for the strategy of the analysis, and with a view to obtaining fairly differentiated variants,” including “practices related to urban spaces,” such as (perhaps) walking (xv). The second sort of investigation looks at a range of writing by sociologists and linguists that elaborates a theory of such practices (xv-xvi). It’s really the first kind of investigation that interests me, but I did read (at least some of) the chapters in which de Certeau examines and critiques potential theoretical models for the kind of research he wants to conduct.
These three determinations, he continues, “make possible an exploration of the cultural field” that sets out “to situate the types of operations characterizing consumption in the framework of an economy, and to discern in these practices of appropriation indexes of the creativity that flourishes at the very point where practice ceases to have its own language” (xvi-xvii). This “cultural activity of the non-producers”—in other words of those who consume cultural products (and de Certeau’s definition of cultural products seems to be fairly broad)—is “an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized,” yet it “remains the only one possible for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself” (xvii). Those non-producers are marginal to that “productivist economy,” and yet their marginality is now universal (xvii). That universal marginality, however, doesn’t mean that consumers are homogenous; there are differences between the ways members of different groups respond creatively to cultural products (xvii). For de Certeau, “culture articulates conflicts and alternately legitimizes, displaces, or controls the superior force”—that is, the force (or forces) aligned with the production of those cultural products, the dominant economic order or “productivist economy” (xvii). “It develops an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence, for which it provides symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or less temporary,” he continues. “The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices” (xvii). So, although de Certeau doesn’t use the word “resistance” here (yet), his language suggests that resistance is precisely what he intends to explore.
All of that—consumer production—is de Certeau’s first topic or theme. His second is the tactics of practice (xvii). He intends to diversify the overly simplistic relationship between consumers and the mechanisms of production in relation to three concerns: “the search for a problematics that could articulate the material collected; the description of a limited number of practices (reading, talking, walking, dwelling, cooking, etc.) considered to be particularly significant; and the extension of the analysis of these everyday operations to scientific fields apparently governed by another kind of logic” (xviii). He is interested, he writes, in the “‘indirect’ or ‘errant’ trajectories” produced through the signifying practices of consumers—note the shift in language, from production to signification—which “trace out the ruses of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in which they develop” (xviii). The word “trajectory” here suggests movement, but for de Certeau it also suggests “a plane projection, a flattening out. It is a transcription” or a graph, “a line which can be reversed (i.e., read in both directions)—and therefore, for de Certeau, a reduction (xviii-xix). Because “trajectory” suggests a reductive process, de Certeau intends to use the words “tactics” and “strategies” instead (xix).
Those two words—“tactics” and “strategies”—constitute the primary binary opposition which organizes de Certeau’s thinking in The Practice of Everyday Life. Strategies, to speak crudely (which de Certeau never does), belong to power:
I call a “strategy” the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment.” A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, “clientèles,” “targets,” or “objects” of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. (xix)
A tactic, on the other hand, refers to “a calculus which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other” (xix). Tactics are thus linked to resistances to power. (A note here suggests that Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice is the source of this distinction—yet another reason I need to read that book.) But more than just resistances to power, tactics use the strategies of the other as vehicles for resistance:
A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The “proper” is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing.” Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities.” The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them. This is achieved in the propitious moments when they are able to combine heterogenous elements (thus, in the supermarket, the housewife confronts heterogenous and mobile data—what she has in the refrigerator, the tastes, appetites, and moods of her guests, the best buys and their possible combinations with what she already has on hand at home, etc.); the intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form, however, not of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and manner in which the opportunity is “seized.” (xix)
Tactics show how intelligence is inseparable from “the everyday struggles and pleasures it articulates” (xx), while “strategies . . . conceal beneath objective calculations their connection with the power that sustains them from within the stronghold of its own ‘proper’ place or institution” (xx).
These quotations lead me to make two comments. First, de Certeau isn’t interested in discourses but in practices; later, he talks about how difficult it is to write about practices (something I don’t quite understand, since people do it all the time). Second, while it’s true that de Certeau doesn’t use the word “resistance” here, the military overtones of his language—“seized,” “base,” “victory”—suggest a struggle between “strategies” and “tactics,” with one representing forces with significant capital and political power, and the other representing forces mounting a sort of guerrilla struggle against the former. That makes de Certeau’s example—“the housewife” shopping for a dinner party—hard to understand as an example of resistance. A person at a supermarket is certainly navigating or negotiating “heterogenous and mobile data,” but is that kind of navigation or negotiation necessarily resistance to the power that organizes that supermarket and the networks of corporate power in which it is situated? I’m not convinced. Maybe it’s a poor example, or maybe I’ve misunderstood de Certeau on the question of resistance, or maybe he actually does see resistance in practices or activities as banal as “talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.” (xix). These activities, he argues, “are tactical in character,” as are, “more generally, many ‘ways of operating’: victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’ (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning,’ maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike” (xix). So finding a bargain at the supermarket, if it’s a case of getting away with something or making a joyful discovery, would be resistance to power, according to de Certeau. (I am still wondering, though, what he means by “the violence of things.” What “things”? How are they violent? The point is not developed and remains unclear. Clearly I’m missing something.)
For de Certeau, reading is an example of “everyday practices that produce without capitalizing, that is, without taking control over time” (xx). Although our society encourages “a hypertrophic development of reading” (maybe in the 1970s, but not today, if my students are to be believed), but reading itself is not passive: “the act of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance” (xxi). The reader, however, “cannot protect himself against the erosion of time,” because “while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read”; the reader thus “insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation” (xxi). Readers, like renters, make changes to spaces they do not own, as do speakers and pedestrians. In the streets, pedestrians “fill with the forests of their desires of desires and goals” (xxi). In fact, any users of “social codes” turn those codes “into metaphors and ellipses of their own quests,” according to de Certeau (xxi-xxii). He is particularly interested in the uses of space, cooking, and “the many ways of establishing a kind of reliability within the situations imposed on an individual, that is, of making it possible to live in them by reintroducing into them the plural mobility of goals and desires—an art of manipulating and enjoying” (xxii). Any practice that involves the manipulation of an imposed situation, and the production of pleasure through such a manipulation, is thus a subtle (perhaps very subtle indeed) form of resistance and the production of a practice defined by mobility, goals, and desires.
De Certeau describes “the status of the individual in technical systems”—the kinds of systems of power he associates with power (xxiii), and this description gives a clearer sense of the kind of resistance he sees as possible within those “technical systems”:
the involvement of the subject diminishes in proportion to the technocratic expansion of these systems. Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks, the individual detaches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover, within an electronicized and computerized megalopolis, the “art” of the hunters and rural folk of earlier days. The fragmentation of the social fabric today lends a political dimension to the problem of the subject. (xxiii-xxiv)
The only possibilities of resistance that are available to individual subjects within the totalized systems of power de Certeau imagines here are tricks, dodges, and ruses—no other opportunities seem to exist in the “vast frameworks” that contain us. This argument explains how everyday practices like shopping or reading or walking might be considered resistance. Such resistances may change very little, but according to de Certeau, they are all that is available now.
The introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, then, establishes de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics and explains what he means by resistances to power. The first chapter of the book begins elsewhere—in the “cleavage” between science (which seems to mean knowledge more broadly—I think the translation is faulty here) and everyday life which “organizes modernity” (6). That division separates modernity “into scientific and dominant islands set off against the background of practice ‘resistances’ and symbolizations that cannot be reduced to thought” (6). Two figures have been charged with the task of mediating between society—which I think means “everyday life” here—and “a body of knowledge”: the Expert, who “introduces his speciality into the wider and more complex arena of socio-political decisions,” transmuting competence into “social authority,” and the Philosopher, who “re-establishes the relevance of general questions to a particular technique (mathematics, logic, psychiatry, history, etc.),” causing “ordinary questions” to “become a skeptical principle in a technical field” (6-7). Philosophers seem to be conduits for “ordinary questions” to enter scientific discourse, whereas Experts seem to lend their knowledge to institutions of power. For de Certeau, the Expert is more common in today’s society, replacing the Philosopher, but the Expert’s translation of competence into authority has a cost: the more authority the Expert has, the less competence he (or she) possesses, “up to the point where his fund of competence is exhausted, like the energy necessary to put a mobile into movement” (7). That, de Certeau argues, is the “paradox of authority: a knowledge is ascribed to it and this knowledge is precisely what it lacks where it is exercised” (8). I’m not sure if that statement is insightful or cynical, but de Certeau is certain of it’s validity; he suggests that authority “is indissociable from an ‘abuse of knowledge,’” and that there is a “social law that divests the individual or his competence in order to establish (or re-establish) the capital of a collective competence, that is, of a common verisimilitude” (8). Experts, according to de Certeau, cannot limit themselves to talking about things they know, and so they pronounce “on the basis of the place” that their specialties have won for them (8)—a place that gives them the authority to speak. This “overproduction of authority leads to the devaluation of authority, since one always gets more in exchange for an equal or inferior amount of competence” (8). In other words the Expert “confuses social place with technical discourse”; in other words, the Expert is the victim (or perpetrator?) of a mistaken identity (8).
De Certeau argues that Wittgenstein’s “rigorous examination of ordinary language” constitutes “a radical critique of the Expert,” and of the Philosopher as Expert (9). Wittgenstein—whose work I have never read, and so I cannot judge the validity of de Certeau’s argument here—conducts a double combat: “he combats the professionalization of philosophy, that is, its reduction to the technical (i.e., positivist) discourse of a speciality” on the one hand, rejecting “the purifying process that, by eliminating the ordinary use of language (everyday language), makes it possible for science to produce and master an artificial language” (10), while at the same time, he “combats the rashness of metaphysics and the impatience of ethics, which are always led to subsume the rules of correct use and to pay with the meaninglessness of some statements for the authority of their discourse on the language of common experiences” (10). Wittgenstein, de Certeau continues, “attacks the presumption that leads philosophy to proceed ‘as if’ it gave meaning to ordinary use, and to suppose that it has its own place from which it can reflect on the everyday” (10-11). There is no such place of mastery for philosophers in relation to language, however, because ordinary language “encompasses every discourse, even if human experiences cannot be reduced to what it can say about them” (11). “The analyzing discourse and the analyzed ‘object’ are in the same situation,” de Certeau argues:
both are organized by the practical activity with which they are concerned, both are determined by rules they neither establish nor see clearly, equally scattered in differentiated ways of working (Wittgenstein wanted his work itself to be composed only of fragments), inscribed in a texture in which each can by turns “appeal” to the other, cite it and refer to it. There is a continual exchange of distinct places. Philosophical or scientific privilege disappears into the ordinary. This disappearance has as its corollary the invalidation of truths. From what privileged place could they be signified? There will thus be facts that are no longer truths. The inflation of the latter is controlled, if not shut off, by the criticism of the places of authority in which facts are converted into truths. Detecting them by their mixture of meaninglessness and power, Wittgenstein attempts to reduce these truths to linguistic facts and to that which, in these facts, refers to an ineffable or “mystical” exteriority of language. (11)
Such an exteriority is “mystical” because it does not exist: we cannot leave language to find some other place from which to interpret language. Therefore, de Certeau continues, there are “no separate groups of false interpretations and true interpretations, but only illusory interpretations, since in short there is no way out, the fact remains that that we are foreigners on this inside—but there is no outside. Thus we constantly ‘run up against the limits’ of ordinary language” (13-14). For de Certeau, “Wittgenstein’s fragmented and rigorous body of work seems to provide a philosophical blueprint for a contemporary science of the ordinary,” because it recognizes that there is no position outside of what is being studied to guarantee the truth of that study, and “as a theoretical hypothesis,” this model must be compared with other “human sciences” such as sociology, ethnology, history, and what they contribute “to the knowledge of ordinary culture” (14).
De Certeau’s second chapter begins with the idea that stories about miracles are instances of a popular use of religion, which modifies the functioning of a religion (17-18). “More generally,” he continues, a way of using imposed systems”—like the miraculous stories he describes—“constitutes the resistance to the historical law of a state of affairs and its dogmatic legitimations”:
A practice of the order constructed by others redistributes its space; it creates at least a certain play in that order, a space for maneuvers of unequal forces and for utopian points of reference. That is where the opacity of a “popular” culture could be said to manifest itself—a dark rock that refuses all assimilation. (18)
Such “ways of using” are tactics of “the subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups which, since they lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already established forces and representations,” de Certeau continues, and the skill required in such resistances are those of “ceaselessly recreating opacities and ambiguities—spaces of darkness and trickery—in the universe of technocratic transparency, a skill that disappears into them and reappears again, taking no responsibility for the administration of a totality” (18). That, at least, is de Certeau’s hypothesis (18), and it is inspired, as he suggests in the book’s introduction, by the “problematics of enunciation” in linguistics (19). A speech act, he claims, “cannot be parted from its circumstances,” which distinguishes such enunciations from “discourses, the data that can most easily be grasped, recorded, transported and examined in secure places” (20). Those enunciations or speech acts, then, are aligned with popular culture or everyday life, and those discourses are aligned with institutions of power or totalizing authority.
According to de Certeau, “the complex geography of social ruses” (22) can be found in games, in the stories people tell about games, and in tales and legends, both in their form and content, and in the tactics they reveal (22-24). The tropes employed in those tales and legends “inscribe in ordinary language the ruses, displacements, ellipses, etc., that scientific reason has eliminated from operational discourses in order to constitute ‘proper’ meanings,” but such figures of speech are “ruses” or “the memory of a culture”; they are “tricks” that “characterize a popular art of speaking” (24). “With these examples of terrains on which one can locate the specific modalities of ‘enunciative’ practices (manipulations of imposed spaces, tactics relative to particular situations),”
the possibility is opened up of analyzing the immense field of an “art of practice” differing from the models that (in theory) reign from top to bottom in a culture certified by education (from the universities to the elementary schools), models that all postulate the constitution of a space of their own (a scientific space or a blank page to be written on), independent of speakers and circumstances, in which they can construct a system based on rules ensuring the system’s production, repetition, and verification. (24)
That art of practice is clearly resistant to the system based on “imposed spaces” and on the “rules” that ensure its continued “production, repetition, and verification.” Perhaps, de Certeau suggests, that art of practice can be analyzed by resorting to its very own procedures, which would enable us to “revise our views on both its definition as ‘popular’ and our position as observers” (24).
By this point, I was eager for a concrete example that would bring de Certeau’s theorizing down to earth, and he provides one: la perruque, the wig, a form of resistance in which workers use company time and/or resources to do things for themselves:
In the very place where the machine he must serve reigns supreme, he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other workers or his family through spending his time in this way. (25-26)
Practices like la perruque are penalized or ignored, including by those who study popular culture (26). Nevertheless, they suggest an alternative economy, one based on gifts and tricks, that exists within the larger economy, in its margins or interstices (27). This leads de Certeau to make a call for action:
Let us try to make a perruque in the economic system whose rules and hierarchies are repeated, as always, in scientific institutions. In the area of scientific research (which defines the current order of knowledge), working with its machines and making use of its scraps, we can divert the time owed to the institutions; we can make textual objects that signify an art and solidarities; we can play the game of free exchange, even if it is penalized by bosses and colleagues when they are not willing to “turn a blind eye” on it; we can create networks of connivances and sleights of hand; we can exchange gifts; and in these ways we can subvert the law that, in the scientific factory, puts work at the service of the machine and, by a similar logic, progressively destroys the requirement of creation and the “obligation to give.” (27-28)
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure of what this means, or how to take the workers’ tactic of la perruque and apply it to the academy, “the scientific factory” of which de Certeau speaks. The “scientific factory” where I work and study may be about to go on strike, but that isn’t what de Certeau is talking about. And although our research tends to be given away—at least to the journals where it is published—I doubt that’s his point, either. What might it mean to “make textual objects that signify an art and solidarities”? I just don’t know. But de Certeau believes that such “everyday tactics” would be essential to transforming research into popular culture: they would enable such researchers “to practice an ‘ordinary’ art, to find oneself in the common situation, and to make a kind of perruque of writing itself” (28). The notion of the perruque is interesting and suggestive, but I’m left wondering what one might make of it in the context of research.
De Certeau begins the following chapter with la perruque, claiming that it is “infiltrating itself everywhere and becoming more and more common” (29). Moreover, la perruque “is only one case among all the practices which introduce artistic tricks and competitions of accomplices into a system that reproduces and partitions through work or leisure” (29). “Although they remain dependant upon the possibilities offered by circumstances,” de Certeau continues,
these transverse tactics do not obey the law of the place, for they are not defined or identified by it. In this respect, they are not any more localizable than the technocratic (and scriptural) strategies that seek to create places in conformity with abstract models. But what distinguishes them at the same time concerns the types of operations and the role of spaces: strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces, when those operations take place, whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert those spaces. (29-30)
Strategies of power, de Certeau argues, possess spaces they can impose on ordinary people, and tactics of resistance are limited to using (in different ways) such imposed spaces against those strategies. What matters, for that reason, are “the operational schemas” (30) of resistant actions:
Just as in literature one differentiates “styles” or ways of writing, one can distinguish “ways of operating”—ways of walking, reading, producing, speaking, etc. These styles of action intervene in a field which regulates them at a first level (for example, at the level of the factory system), but they introduce into it a way of turning it to their advantage that obeys other rules and constitutes something like a second level interwoven into the first (for instance, la perruque). These “ways of operating” are similar to “instructions for use,” and they create a certain play in the machine through a stratification of different and interfering kinds of functioning. (30)
For de Certeau, “it is precisely a matter of recognizing in these ‘uses’ ‘actions’ (in the military sense of the word) that have their own formality and inventiveness and that discreetly organize the multiform labor of consumption” (30). At this point, I found myself hungering for an example again, and again, de Certeau provides one: we need to ask what consumers make of the television programs they watch, or the magazines and newspapers they read, or the urban spaces they inhabit: what do they do with them? (31). Those products—what “the consumer-sphinx” makes out of the cultural objects he or she consumes—are
scattered in the graphs of televised, urbanistic, and commercial production. They are all the less visible because the networks framing them are becoming more and more tightly woven, flexible, and totalitarian. They are thus protean in form, blending in with their surroundings, and liable to disappear into the colonizing organizations whose products leave no room where the consumers can mark their activity. (31)
And yet, by describing these consumers as sphinxes, de Certeau is suggesting that whatever riddles they produce will be impossible to interpret—which might be the reason he offers so few examples: not just because he is setting out to construct a theory of such production, but because examples of that production would be impossible to understand. Nevertheless, he reasserts the claim that the consumption of cultural products is a form of production, and that this form of production is “characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the effect of the circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed on it” (31).
At this point, de Certeau returns to the claim that linguistic enunciation is a model of the characteristics of acts of cultural consumption, even in practices (like walking) that involve “non-linguistic systems” (33). I’m not sure why he feels compelled to do so: as a metaphor or analogy, this claim seems reasonable, and it’s clear from his use of the word “hypothesis” (33) that de Certeau doesn’t intend to take it further. Consumers are “[u]nrecognized producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in jungles of functionalist rationality,” he argues, and they “trace ‘indeterminate trajectories’ that are apparently meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated space through which they move. They are sentences that remain unpredictable within the space ordered by the organizing techniques of systems” (34). Indeed, he continues, consumers “use as their material the vocabularies of established languages,” but “although they remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes (the temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic organizations of places, etc.), these ‘traverses’ remain heterogenous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires” (34). The activities of these consumers are like “waves that flow in everywhere,” and they “circulate without being seen, discernible only through the objects they move about and erode. The practices of consumption are the ghosts of the society that carries their name. Like the ‘spirits’ of former times, they constitute the multiform and occult postulate of productive activity” (35). No wonder he doesn’t provide many examples of these practices, given their ghostly and evanescent nature.
De Certeau acknowledges that his use of the word “trajectory” to “suggest a temporal movement through space” is insufficient, “precisely because a trajectory is drawn, and time and movement are thus reduced to a line that can be seized as a whole by the eye and read in a single moment, as one projects onto a map the path taken by someone walking through a city” (35). That flattening out might be useful, but it is reductive, because “it transforms the temporal articulation of places into a spatial sequence of points” (35). That reduction is a serious problem, and therefore he returns to the distinction between strategies and tactics, which “appears to provide a more adequate initial schema”:
I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as a base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. (35-36)
I realize that de Certeau is repeating himself, but because I am wondering whether such repetitions are identical or whether they contain important differences, I am going to trace them in this immanent reading. You never know—he might add something significant in one iteration or another, or take something significant away. If he does, I want to know that.
Strategy, de Certeau continues, is about distinguishing the place of one’s own power and will from “a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other” (36), and there are important effects that accompany this break “between a place appropriated as one’s own and its other” (36). This break is a triumph of place over time; it is a mastery of places through a panoptic practice that transforms “foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured” and therefore controlled; and it sustains and determines a specific type of knowledge through the power to provide oneself with one’s own place (36). I want to point out here de Certeau’s regular and incorrect elision of the differences between “panoptic” and “panoramic” or even “optic.” A panoptic practice internalizes surveillance in the subject of that surveillance, so that even if the surveillance isn’t happening (or if the subject can’t be certain that he or she is under surveillance), the subject will still behave according to the rules set by the group carrying out the surveillance. It isn’t just a practice of looking or seeing. De Certeau makes this mistake consistently, which leaves me wondering how well he has read the work of Michel Foucault, where the notion of panopticism is elaborated (particularly in his magisterial book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison). It might seem like a small point, and maybe it is, but in his chapters on Foucault and Bourdieu, that mistake makes me wonder whether he isn’t making similar mistakes in his analysis of the latter’s writing.
In contrast to strategy, “a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus”:
No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection. . . . It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary as a whole within a [distinct], visible, and objectifiable space. It operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment. It must vigilantly make sure of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse. (36-37)
“In short, a tactic is an art of the weak,” de Certeau concludes (37), and what consumers do with the things they consume constitute tactics, because those consumers lack power in comparison to the systems in which the things they consume originate (38).
This distinction is so important to de Certeau that he returns to it again in order to offer a clarification:
strategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which those forces are distributed. They combine these three types of places and seek to master each by means of the others. They thus privilege spatial relationships. At the very lease they attempt to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through the analytical attribution of a proper place to each particular element and through the combinatory organization of the movements specific to units or groups of units. The model was military before it became ‘scientific.’ (38)
Tactics, on the other hand,
are procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time—to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments in an action, to the possible intersections of durations and heterogenous rhythms, etc. (38)
Strategy, then, is about the establishment of a place; tactics are about using time and the opportunities time presents as well as the “play” that time “introduces into the foundations of power” (38-39). These “two ways of acting can be distinguished according to whether they bet on place or on time” (39). For de Certeau, tactics can be fruitfully compared to some Freudian ideas, particularly the return of the repressed, metaphors, condensations, and metonymies, all of which “are the indexes of consumption and of the interplay of forces” which “depend on a problematics of enunciation” (39).
“Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping, and cooking are activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises,” de Certeau suggests, because these practices constitute “clever tricks of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the ‘strong’” and are “an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf” (40). These practices are nondiscursive, they are part of “a memory without language” that exists, among other places, on “the streets of our great cities,” streets which are the subject of the chapter of this book that is, for me, the most important. More importantly, though, these “clever tricks” are becoming a dominant force. According to de Certeau,
it seems that the generalization and expansion of technocratic rationality have created, between the links of the system, a fragmentation and explosive growth of these practices which were formerly regulated by stable local units. Tactics are more and more frequently going off their tracks. Cut loose from the traditional communities that circumscribed their functioning, they have begun to wander everywhere in a space which is becoming at once more homogenous and more extensive. Consumers are transformed into immigrants. The system in which they move about is too vast to be able to fix them in place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere. There is no longer an elsewhere. Because of this, the “strategic” model is also transformed, as it is defeated by its own success: it was by definition based on the definition of a “proper” distinct from everything else; but now that “proper” has become the whole. (40)
This paradox—the notion that strategy has been defeated by its own success—is perhaps a typical movement in 1970s French philosophy or theory, but for de Certeau, it’s clear that strategy needed something outside of itself in order to define itself, and now that it has become totalized and occupies all space, because that necessary “elsewhere” has disappeared, tactics in turn have become omnipresent. I find myself wondering how accurate this account might be; as with much of the rest of this book, de Certeau is making an assertion here without providing evidence.
The second part of The Practice of Everyday Life is about theories of tactical practices, particularly the work of Foucault and Bourdieu. It begins, however, with a reflection on the procedures on which everyday practices depend—the “schemas of operations and of technical manipulations” (43) that constitute those everyday practices. According to de Certeau, it is possible, if not to define those procedures, then at least to clarify the way they operate relative to discourse or ideology or what Bourdieu calls the habitus. The chapters in this part of the book are a critique of the attempts made by Foucault and Bourdieu to describe the way procedures operate. “Tactics in discourse can . . . be the formal indicator of tactics that have no discourse,” de Certeau writes, and those tactics without discourse are the everyday practices that interest him. “Moreover, the ways of thinking embedded in ways of operating constitute a strange—and massive—case of the relations between practices and theories” (45). This statement seems to represent one of the reasons de Certeau wants to investigate theories about practices.
He begins with Foucault, particularly Discipline and Punish, which he suggests enacts the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, or reversal and substitution: “the place occupied by the reformist projects of the late eighteenth century has been ‘colonized,’ ‘vampirized,’ by the disciplinary procedures that subsequently organize the social space” (45), and “a political technology of the body” wins out, in Foucault’s account, “over the elaboration of a body of doctrine” (46). Foucault comes to this conclusion through what de Certeau describes as a “surgical operation”: “starting out from a proliferating contemporary system—a judicial and scientific technology—and tracing it back through history, isolating from the whole body the cancerous growth that has invaded it, and explaining its current functioning by its genesis over the two preceding centuries” (47). However, de Certeau argues that it is impossible “to reduce the functioning of a society to a dominant type of procedures” (48). There are always practices of resistance, a “multifarious and silent ‘reserve’ of procedures that we should look for in ‘consumer’ practices” (48). In other words, he writes, “[b]eneath what one might call the ‘monotheistic’ privilege that panoptic apparatuses have won for themselves, a ‘polytheism’ of scattered practices survives, dominated by not erased by the triumphal success of one of their number” (48).
From here, de Certeau turns to Bourdieu, particularly his book Outline of a Theory of Practice, which he calls “an interdisciplinary operation” that shifts from one genre to another: “from ethnology to sociology” (51). That interdisciplinarity—the confrontations Bourdieu stages between two disciplines—troubles de Certeau:
These confrontations are supposed to provide a mutual epistemological elucidation: they labor to bring their implicit foundations to light—the ambition and the myth of knowledge. But perhaps what is at stake is different and has to do rather with the otherness introduced by the move through which a discipline turns toward the darkness that surrounds and precedes it—not in order to eliminate it, but because it is inexpungeable and determining? In that case theory would involve an effort on the part of a science to think through its relation to this exteriority and not be satisfied with correcting its rules of production or determining the limits of its validity. (51)
However, de Certeau isn’t sure that’s “the path that Bourdieu’s discourse takes” (51). I honestly don’t understand de Certeau’s objection to what he calls the insertion of “the ‘ethnological’ exception into an empty space in the sociological system” (52). I do understand that Bourdieu’s book brings together an anthropological study of a community in North Africa with theory of how societies function: for de Certeau, that bringing together results in “a twofold deception”: “[w]ith its synthetic tables, scientific method conceals the operation of withdrawal and power that makes them possible,” whereas “practitioners necessarily do not reveal the practical difference created among these ‘data’ by the operations that make use of them” and “thus they collaborate in the production of general tabulations which conceal their tactics from the observer” (53). What is the objection being stated here? I don’t get it, but it’s a fundamental part of de Certeau’s objection to Bourdieu’s work.
Bourdieu’s interest is in strategies, apparently, and not tactics. He argues (according to de Certeau) that strategies involve “‘implicit principles’ or postulates” which are undefined and therefore create “margins of tolerance and the possibility of setting one against the other” (53), as well as “‘explicit rules’ that “are accompanied by a limit that inverts them,” so that every use of these rules must “take into account the possibility of this threatening—because linked to the contingencies of life—rebound against it” (53-54). According to de Certeau, Bourdieu discerns a number of “essential procedures” in strategies. They are polytheistic: “the same thing has uses and properties that vary according to the arrangements into which it enters” (54). They involve substitutability: “a thing is always replaceable by another, because of the affinity of each with the others within the totality that the thing represents” (54). They use euphemism: “one must hide the fact that actions conflict with the dichotomies and antinomies represented by the symbolic system. Ritual actions furnish the model for ‘euphemism’ by combining contraries” (54). And while they are based on analogy, because “[t]hey are camouflaged transgressions, inserted metaphors and, precisely in that measure, they become acceptable, taken as legitimate since they respect the distinctions established by language even as they undermine them” (54-55).
For de Certeau, two characteristics limit this account of strategies to the characteristics of the community Bourdieu studied, rather than being generally applicable. First, Bourdieu “always presupposes a twofold link between these practices and a proper place (a patrimony), on the one hand, and a collective principle of administration (the family, the group) on the other”—a “double postulate” that may not hold (55). Second, “[t]he use of the term ‘strategy’ is no less limited,” because in Bourdieu’s account, the people making use of those strategies are ignorant of what they are doing and cannot therefore form strategic intentions (55-56). In other words, Bourdieu is claiming that the culture of the people he studied is both coherent and unconscious, which is an impossibility: “The unconsciousness of the group studied was the price that had to be paid (the price it had to pay) for its coherence. A society could be a system only without knowing it” (56). Okay, but de Certeau has described his own society in the same way, as a totalizing system. What’s the difference? How is it that his critique of Bourdieu doesn’t also apply to his own work?
De Certeau also argues that Bourdieu’s account of society requires it to be stable and unchanging: “As in the traditional image of primitive or peasant societies, nothing moves, there is no history other than that written on them by an alien order” (57-58). Moreover, while the habitus ends up providing “the basis for explaining a society in relationship to structures,” that same habitus, in order to be stable, “must be unverifiable, invisible” (58). Again, coming from someone who generally eschews concrete examples, this is a surprising criticism. Bourdieu, de Certeau continues, is interested in how practices are generated, not how they are produced, but his theory is a circle, moving from structures (a constructed model) to the habitus (an assumed reality) to strategies and conjunctures (interpretations of observed facts) (58). For de Certeau, the habitus thus becomes a totalizing dogma. “Bourdieu’s texts are fascinating in their analyses and aggressive in their theory,” de Certeau writes. “They are full of contrasts. Scrupulously examining practices and their logic . . . the texts finally reduce them to a mystical reality, the habitus, which is to bring them under the law of reproduction,” so that “subtle descriptions” of tactics “suddenly give way to violently imposed truths, as if the complexity so lucidly examined required the brutal counterpart of a dogmatic reason” (59). The habitus, de Certeau concludes, is a fetish (60). I’m rather surprised by this critique, since I’ve mostly heard that Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is useful, and I will perhaps return to it after I read Outline of a Theory of Practice to see if de Certeau’s criticisms make sense. I can’t tell right now, of course, whether he’s on the money or not, since Outline of a Theory of Practice is, for me, an undiscovered country at this point.
De Certeau isn’t finished with either Foucault or Bourdieu yet, however. His next chapter, “The Arts of Theory,” focuses on the problem of theories that deal, perhaps not unlike his own, with practices rather than discourses:
A particular problem arises when, instead of being a discourse on other discourses, as is usually the case, theory has to advance over an area where there are no longer any discourses. There is a sudden unevenness of terrain: the ground on which verbal language rests begins to fail. The theorizing operation finds itself at the limits of the terrain where it normally functions, like an automobile at the edge of a cliff. Beyond and below lies the ocean. (61)
I think this is lovely writing, but as de Certeau goes on to point out, theories of non-discursive practices are common: “since Kant every theoretical effort has had to give a more or less direct explanation of its relationship to this non-discursive activity, to this immense ‘remainder’ constituted by the part of human experience that has not been tamed and symbolized in language” (61). In this chapter, de Certeau wants to think about how theory manages to do that, “[b]y what brilliant strokes or through what ruses” (62).
The work of Foucault and Bourdieu, de Certeau argues, share a “theorizing operation” that “consists of two moments”: “first, cut out; then turn over. First an ‘ethnological’ isolation; then a logical inversion” (62). The first move isolates certain practices from “an undefined fabric” (Foucault’s disciplinary procedures, Bourdieu’s strategies) in such a way that the isolated part metonymically represents the whole (62). “The second move turns over the unit thus cut out,” de Certeau continues. “At first obscure, silent, and remote, the unit is inverted to become the element that illuminates theory and sustains discourse” (63). So the notion of disciplinary techniques, on the one hand, and the habitus, on the other, become keys to explaining everything (63). But this operation presents us with a problem: “by assuming that this isolated element has a metonymic value, and by thus passing over other practices, it forgets those that guarantee its own construction” (63).
The problem of theorizing “‘know-how’ without a discourse” (65) is another difficulty. Such know-how “is composed of multiple but untamed operativities”:
This proliferation does not obey the law of discourse, but rather that of production, the ultimate value of physiocratic and later capitalist economics. It thus challenges scientific writing’s privilege of organizing production. It alternately exacerbates and stimulates the technicians of language. It claims to conquer and annex not contemptible practices, but ‘ingenious,’ ‘complex,’ and ‘effective’ forms of knowledge. (65)
As I parse those sentences, I find myself confused as to the referents of the pronouns, particularly the multiple uses of “it.” The proliferation (of practices) is what challenges scientific writing, but is that proliferation the same thing that “stimulates the technicians of language”? But isn’t it scientific writing that “claims to conquer and annex” those forms of knowledge? What is happening here? Is this a clumsy translation or is de Certeau himself responsible? I’m not sure. In any case, there are two moves in scientific writing’s attempt at conquering and annexing practical forms of knowledge: description, which “depends on narrativity,” and “perfection,” which “aims at a technical optimization” (65-66). Through these moves, “the position of the ‘arts’ is fixed, neighboring on but out of the field of science” (66). Well, does description really depend on narrativity? And who actually hopes to achieve perfection? Again, I’m at a loss.
And yet, if I am to finish thinking about this chapter, I must forge on. Art, for de Certeau, is “a kind of knowledge that operates outside the enlightened discourse which it lacks. More importantly, this know-how surpasses, in its complexity, enlightened science” (66). That’s a huge claim to make, and (not surprisingly) de Certeau does not substantiate it. Instead, he moves on:
The “everyday” arts no more “form” a new product than they have their own language. They “make do” (bricolent). But through the reorganization and hierarchization of knowledge according to the criterion of productivity, these arts come to represent a standard, because of their operativity, and an avant-garde, because of their ‘experimental and manouvrier” subtlety. (66)
The arts—and it’s important to note that this term seems to include fine art practices along with more practical manual activities—are outside of scientific languages and represent “an absolute of the power of operating (an efficiency which, unmoored from discourse, nevertheless reflects is productivist ideal) and a reserve of knowledge one can inventory in shops or in the countryside” (66). One place these arts end up being represented is in nineteenth-century realistic fiction and other stories, which results in practical knowledge becoming aestheticized, although it is supposedly not self-conscious because it is non-discursive in its own right (70). It is only in Kant, de Certeau argues, particularly the Critique of Judgement, that theory and practice become related again (72-74).
De Certeau has one more chapter on theory—this time, the theory of narrativity and the need to recognize its scientific legitimacy—but I’m going to skip ahead to the chapters that actually interest me and are the reason I took on this book: the chapters on spatial practices, including the widely anthologized (and important, for my work) chapter “Walking in the City.” De Certeau begins that chapter with a panoramic view of the streets of New York from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. He compares that view to the walkers in the city below, “whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it”:
These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writing compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and infinitely other. (93)
The conceit here is that the footprints of these walkers are visible, as if they constituted writing that the walkers themselves cannot see. Of course, footprints are not really visible to anyone, and the walkers are no more blind to what they are doing than is the person on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, who is too high up to see individual walkers in any case. The notion that pedestrians make writing with their feet is lovely, but it must be acknowledged that it is a fantasy, that those footprints are imaginary and that the walkers actually do know what they are doing and where they are going. The only blind walkers are the ones who have visual impairments, and they know where they are going, too.
De Certeau’s goal in this chapter is “to locate the practices that are foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions” (93). “These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations (‘ways of operating’), to ‘another spatiality’ (an ‘anthropological,’ poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” (93). Ah, now the point of the walkers who are blind to the text they write becomes clear: the readable city is the city of the grid (he’s writing about New York, after all), the city of urban planners, the city of systems and power, and that city is being juxtaposed against another, one constructed through practices, including walking, that are both quotidian and “infinitely other” (93) to that planned and systematized city.
For de Certeau, “[t]he ‘city’ founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation” (94). First, the city must produce its own space through a “rational organization” that must “repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it” (94). Second,
the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions: univocal scientific strategies, made possible by the flattening out of all the data in a plane projection, must replace the the tactics of users who take advantage of ‘opportunities’ and who, through these trap-events, these lapses in visibility, reproduce the opacities of history everywhere. (94)
Finally, “the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself” (94). In this city/subject, “all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects—groups, associations, or individuals” become attributed to it, and the city “thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties” (94). The city founded by that discourse is, as the word “utopian” suggests, impossible, and yet it would be the triumph of planning and systematizing, a perfect urban machine. De Certeau continues to describe this impossible city:
On the one hand, there is a differentiation and redistribution of the parts and functions of the city, as a result of inversions, displacements, accumulations, etc.; on the other there is a rejection of everything that is not capable of being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the ‘waste products’ of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.). To be sure, progress allows an increasing number of these waste products to be reintroduced into administrative circuits and transforms even deficiencies (in health, security, etc.) into ways of making the networks of order denser. But in reality, it repeatedly produces effects contrary to those at which it aims: the profit system generates a loss which, in the multiple forms of wretchedness and poverty outside the system and of waste inside it, constantly turns production into ‘expenditure.’ Moreover, the rationalization of the city leads to its mythification in strategic discourses, which are calculations based on the hypothesis or the necessity of its destruction in order to arrive at a final decision. Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e., time), causes the condition of its own possibility—space itself—to be forgotten; space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity. (94-95)
That is the (impossible) vision of the modern, functionalist city, “a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socioeconomic and political strategies” (95). Such a city exists only in discourse. In reality, “urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded” (95):
The language of power is in itself ‘urbanizing,’ but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer. (95)
The “Concept-city is decaying,” because there is an “illness affecting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals” (95). In other words, the utopian, functionalist cities are deteriorating “along with the procedures that organized them” (95).
What is that illness? De Certeau suggests that instead of “remaining within the field of a discourse that upholds its privilege by inverting its content”—a swipe at Foucault and Bourdieu—“one can try another path”:
one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization. (96)
In other words, one can study the tactics of resistance, instead of the strategies of power. And so de Certeau asks, “what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?” (96). This, he continues, is an important question, because “spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life” (96). De Certeau’s intention, he writes, is to answer that question: “to follow out a few of these multiform, [resistant], tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us into a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city” (96).
That analysis begins with walking, with footsteps, as a fundamental form of resistance to the apparatuses that produce disciplinary space:
They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. . . . [Pedestrian movements] are not localized; is is rather that they spatialize. (97)
Any attempt to map out or trace the paths or trajectories of pedestrians would miss the point by grasping “only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface projection” (97). Such “fixations,” de Certeau continues, “constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice” (97). The way to proceed, then, is to somehow find a way of examining “the operations of walking” themselves, the specific “way of being in the world” they are part of, rather than the relics of their existence (97).
Not surprising, given his earlier use of this analogy, de Certeau suggests that “[t]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered” (97):
At the most elementary level, it has a triple ‘enunciative’ function: it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language); and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements (just as verbal enunciation is an “allocution,” “posits another opposite” the speaker and puts contracts between interlocutors into action). (97-98)
Walking is therefore “a space of enunciation” (98), and considered from that definition, “the pedestrian speech act has three characteristics which distinguish it at the outset from the spatial system: the present, the discrete, the ‘phatic’” (98). By spatial system, de Certeau seems to be referring to the system or order represented by the Concept-city, although I could be wrong about that. He begins with the first point, “the present”:
if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. (98)
I find myself wondering if the words “drifting away” are a reference to the Situationist dérive, something of which de Certeau had to be aware. In any case, de Certeau suggests that “the walker transforms each spatial signifier into something else,” the way that Charlie Chaplin “multiplies the possibilities of his cane” (98). “And,” he continues,
if on the one hand he actualizes only a few of the possibilities fixed by the constructed order (he goes only here and not there), on the other he increases the number of possibilities (for example, by creating shortcuts and detours) and prohibitions (for example, he forbids himself to take paths generally considered accessible or even obligatory. He thus makes a selection. (98)
This leads to de Certeau’s second point: a pedestrian “creates a discreteness, whether by making choices among the signifiers of the spatial ‘language’ or by displacing them through the use he makes of them. He condemns certain places to inertia or disappearance and composes with others ‘spatial turns of phrase’ that are ‘rare,’ ‘accidental,’ or illegitimate. But that already leads into a rhetoric of walking” (98-99). Finally, the “phatic” aspect of walking refers to “the function . . . of terms that initiate, maintain, or interrupt contact, such as ‘hello,’ ‘well, well,’ etc.” (99):
Walking, which alternately follows a path and has followers, creates a mobile organicity in the environment, a sequence of phatic topoi. And if it is true that the phatic function, which is an effort to ensure communication, is already characteristic of the language of talking birds . . . it is not surprising that it also gambols, goes on all fours, dances, and walks about, with a light or heavy step, like a series of “hellos” in an echoing labyrinth, anterior or parallel to informative speech. (99)
Once again, I am left dumbfounded by de Certeau. What does he mean by referring to “talking birds”? How did we get there from walking? How is any of this related to the alleged phatic function of walking? I am confused, although the reference to singing in these sentences might help to clarify his point:
Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc. the trajectories it “speaks.” All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, ranging from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity. (99)
When I first read these words, I thought that de Certeau’s affirmation of walking’s complexity was an argument against attempting to reduce the pedestrian’s steps “to their graphic trail” by tracing them on a map (99). Now, though, I wonder if the reference to singing picks up on the earlier reference to birds. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.
The next section of the essay is called “Walking rhetorics,” and its discussion was anticipated by de Certeau’s earlier reference to “a rhetoric of walking” (99). “The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures,’” de Certeau begins. “There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of ‘turning’ phrases finds an equivalent in the art of composing a path (tourner un parcours)” (100). The art of walking, he continues, “implies and combines styles and uses” (100). Here, “style” refers to a linguistic structure that is individualized, where as “use” “defines the social phenomenon through which a system of communication manifests itself in actual fact; it refers to a norm” (100). In other words, walking combines linguistic terms that would typically be considered to be opposites. “Style and use both have to do with a ‘way of operating’ (of speaking, walking, etc.), but style involves a peculiar processing of the symbolic, while use refers to elements of a code,” de Certeau writes. “They intersect to form a style of use, a way of being and a way of operating” (100).
The notion that “the ‘tropes’ catalogued by rhetoric furnish models and hypotheses for the analysis of ways of appropriating places”—through walking, apparently—is supported by “[t]wo postulates” (100). First, de Certeau is assuming that “the practices of space also correspond to the manipulations of the basic elements of a constructed order,” and second, he is assuming “that they are, like the tropes in rhetoric, deviations relative to a sort of ‘literal meaning’ defined by the urbanistic system” (100). Given those postulates, he continues, there would be “a homology between verbal figures and the figures of walking” (100). The metaphor of rhetoric leads de Certeau back to the distinction between the system of language and the individual utterance:
the geometrical space of urbanists and architects seems to have the status of the “proper meaning” constructed by grammarians and linguists in order to have a normal and normative level to which they can compare the drifting of “figurative” language. In reality, this faceless “proper” meaning (ce ‘propre’ sans figure) cannot be found in current use, whether verbal or pedestrian; it is merely the fiction produced by a use that is also particular, the metalinguistic use of science that distinguishes itself by that very distinction. (100)
“The long poem of walking,” de Certeau continues,
manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other’s blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler, carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. The can even be said to define it. (101)
Would specific ways of walking then correspond to specific rhetorical figures? De Certeau suggests that the “two pedestrian figures” of synecdoche (naming a part rather than the whole) and asyndeton (suppressing linking words, like conjunctions and adverbs) are common in walking—or at least in talking about walking: de Certeau elides the difference between walking as a practice and discourses about walking here by talking about how these figures might be used in “the narration of a trajectory” (101). So one might refer to a hill instead of a the park in which that hill is situated (synecdoche), or one might skip over or omit parts of a walk (asyndeton), (101) but one would do this in narration—in discourse—rather than in practice.
According to de Certeau, synecdoche and asyndeton are related:
Synecdoche expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a “more” (a totality) and take its place. . . . Asyndeton, by elision, creates a ‘less,’ opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics. Synecdoche replaces totalities by fragments (a less in the place of a more); asyndeton disconnects them by eliminating the conjunctive or the consecutive (nothing in place of something). Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility. A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities and separate islands. Through these swellings, shrinkings, and fragmentations, that is, through these rhetorical operations a spatial phrasing of an analogical (composed of juxtaposed citations) and elliptical (made of gaps, lapses, and allusions) type is created. For the technological system of a coherent and totalizing space that is “linked” and simultaneous, the figures of pedestrian rhetoric substitute trajectories that have a mythical structure, at least if one understands by “myth” a discourse relative to the place/nowhere (or origin) of concrete existence, a story jerry-built out of elements taken from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps mesh with the social practices it symbolizes. (101-02)
Once again, I am confused: is de Certeau talking about walking, or about stories about walking? Is a walk a story if that story is not articulated in discourse? Is narration a metaphor for walking, or is it a literal narration?
Perhaps rather than discussing walking or narrating, de Certeau is merely asserting a parallel between them: the beginning of the next section of the chapter, “Myths: what ‘make things go,” begins by asserting a parallelism between walking, discourse, and dreams: “If there is a parallelism, it is not only because enunciation is dominant in these three areas, but also because its discursive (verbalized, dreamed, or walked) development is organized as a relation between the place from which it proceeds (an origin) and the nowhere it produces (a way of ‘going by’)” (103). The problem, of course, is that walking is not discourse; it is a non-discursive practice, and so to claim that walking has a discursive development is therefore a problem. I’m not convinced, then, that what de Certeau is offering here can be anything more than a comparison, parallel, or analogy. There may be similarities between walking, dreaming, and narrating, but there is one central difference: walking isn’t a discourse. That difference is being elided in de Certeau’s argument.
Nevertheless, de Certeau’s next assertion is quite provocative and potentially productive. “To walk is to lack a place,” he begins:
The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience lacking a place—an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. The identity furnished by this place is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens’ positions and profits, there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places. (103)
De Certeau doesn’t define the terms “space” and “place” until a subsequent chapter, but it’s important to note here that, as Tim Cresswell points out, he reverses the typical usage—in English, or in geographical discourse, or both—of those two terms: “Confusingly, for geographers, Certeau uses space and place in a way that stands the normal distinction on its head. To Certeau, place is the empty grid over which practice occurs while space is what is created by practice” (Cresswell 70). So, when de Certeau refers to “place” in this quotation, he ought to be interpreted as meaning “space.” Confusing, right? What he seems to be saying, then, is that the City—the utopian, totalizing, systematized entity he defined earlier in this chapter—ought to be a space, but “is only a name.” To walk is to lack a space, but the spaceless city consists only of the movements of its residents. There is a strange circularity to this argument, but it seems clear (I think) that de Certeau is arguing that the City doesn’t exist in reality, that it is actually made up of the movements of its citizens. What particularly interests me is the suggestion that the countless walks made by people in an urban space “intertwine and create an urban fabric” (103). I find myself wondering if the “fabric” of any place, urban or rural, might not be made up by the movements of its inhabitants.
From here, de Certeau begins to discuss the role of proper names in the absent City, and the relationship that exists “between the direction of a walk (le sens de la marche) and the meaning of words (le sens des mots),” a relationship that situates “two sorts of apparently contrary movements, one extrovert (to walk is to go outside), the other introvert (a mobility under the stability of the signifier)” (103). I’m not convinced that de Certeau is talking about actual walking any more; perhaps in this chapter “walk” has come to stand in for any movement in an urban space? In any case, de Certeau is asserting a direct connection between place names and walking:
Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions, these words operate in the name of an emptying-out and a wearing-away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. . . . People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers’ steps: names that have ceased precisely to be “proper.” (105)
Why is de Certeau making such a big thing out of place names? He suggests that
they make habitable or believable the place that they clothe with a word (by emptying themselves of their classifying power, they acquire that of ‘permitting’ something else); they recall or suggest phantoms (the dead who are supposed to have disappeared) that still move about, concealed in gestures and in bodies in motion; and by altering functionalist identity by detaching themselves from it, they create in the place itself that erosion or nowhere that the law of the other carves out within it. (105)
So somehow place names, like the practice of walking, function as a form of resistance to power; they are examples of “‘local authorities’” or “superstitions,” “rich silences and wordless stories,” and so tend to be replaced by numbers (106). Walking about, and travelling generally, come to “substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different” (107). There is some connection, therefore, between place names, stories, and walking as forms of resistance.
In fact, de Certeau describes walking as a form of exile, and suggests that it produces “precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations” (107). Again we see a slippage between walking as a non-discursive practice, on the one hand, and discourse, on the other. Such legends—stories, more generally—are “practices that invent spaces” (107):
From this point of view, their contents remain revelatory, and still more so is the principle that organizes them. Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris. Even the literary form and the actantial schema of “superstitions” correspond to stable models whose structures and combinations have often been analyzed over the past thirty years, the materials (all the rhetorical details of their “manifestation”) are furnished with leftovers from nominations, taxonomies, heroic or comic predicates, etc., that is, by fragments of scattered semantic places. These heterogenous and even contrary elements fill the homogenous form of the story. (107)
Stories about places (or spaces—note that de Certeau’s use of these terms is not consistent, at least not at this point, despite Cresswell’s analysis), as well as walking, are thus “spatial practices” that offer resistance to “the constructed order”: “The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn apart by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning; it is a sieve-order” (107). “The dispersion of stories points to the dispersion of the memorable as well,” he continues, describing memory as “a sort of anti-museum” that is not “localizable” (108). Rather, fragments of memory “come out in legends. Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber” (108). The memories de Certeau is talking about here seem to be memories of what used to be in a particular place but is no longer there. Those memories—de Certeau’s word for them is “demonstratives”—“indicate the invisible identities of the visible,” and “it is the very definition of a place . . . that it is composed by these series of displacements and effects among the fragmented strata that form it and that it plays on these moving layers” (108). Such memories lead to places being haunted: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not” (108). I wonder if de Certeau would apply this logic to rural as well as urban places. After all, isn’t rural Saskatchewan haunted by the ghosts of the bison, of the grassland, of the ecosystem that was mostly destroyed in the first 50 years of settlement?
The important thing about such memories is that they remain silent (108): “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body” (108). I know de Certeau is primarily interested in pleasure as a form of resistance, but “encysted” suggests pain, rather than pleasure.
In the final section of this chapter, de Certeau turns to childhood memories of places. “The memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place,” he writes, arguing that such places are palimpsests, “already linked to the absence that structures it as existence” (109). He has used imagery throughout this chapter that suggests places are palimpsests, and he is clearly interested in layers of memories as part of what defines places as forms of resistance, compared to the unstratified definitions of place that are characteristic of the City-concept and its monological discourses. He goes so far as to claim that our experience of space is ultimately a “decisive and originary experience, that of the child’s differentiation from the mother’s body” (109). “This relationship of oneself to oneself”—he seems to be referring to that “joyful and silent experience of childhood” which defines that process of differentiation from the mother—“governs the internal alternations of the place (the relations among its strata) or the pedestrian unfolding of the stories accumulated in a place (moving about the city and travelling),” he contends (110). “The childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a ‘metaphorical’ or mobile city” (110). De Certeau’s theoretical touchstone here has shifted from Foucault to Lacan, and I’m not well-versed in poststructuralist psychoanalysis, so I find this conclusion difficult to understand. Is de Certeau suggesting that the resistant experience of the city is somehow similar to a child before its entry into the Symbolic Order? I wish I could tell. Do I have to put Lacan’s Écrits on my reading list in order to understand this chapter? Perhaps.
De Certeau’s next chapter compares train travel to walking. Traveling by train is a “travelling incarceration,” an experience of immobility in which the passenger is trapped within a “bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible the production of an order, a closed and autonomous insularity—that is what can traverse space and make itself independent of local roots” (111). The same could be said, I suppose, of travelling by plane. I’m not interested in either mode of transportation, so I skipped ahead to the next chapter, “Spatial Stories.” “Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice,” de Certeau begins (115). Such stories “are not satisfied with displacing” what de Certeau calls “pedestrian enunciations and rhetorics” and “transposing them into the field of language” (116). “In reality,” he continues, “they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it” (116). Again there is a curious slippage between walking as a non-discursive practice (or traveling as a non-discursive practice?) and discourse. What does it mean to claim that stories make the journey before it is performed by the pedestrian’s feet? I don’t understand.
By the time I reached this point in de Certeau’s book, I was wondering if he was going to begin distinguishing, in a clear way, between place and space, in the way that Cresswell suggests. The answer, happily, is yes: a place
is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location. . . . The law of the “proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability. (117)
Cresswell suggests, as I’ve said, that de Certeau uses “place” the way that geographers use “space”—as “a more abstract concept than place” that lacks human investments and attachments (Cresswell 15-16). What I notice, though, about de Certeau’s definition of place is that it is (or seems to be) aligned with strategies and power and the Concept-city: it is ruled by “[t]he law of the ‘proper.’” Moreover, de Certeau’s notion of place is of something that is stable and clearly defined, which might make it closer to the geographer’s use of “place.” Space, on the other hand, is quite different:
A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs and contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of actualization, transformed into a term dependant upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper.” (117)
What strikes me about this description is not its relationship to the geographer’s notion of “place,” but rather the way that space, for de Certeau, aligns with tactics, utterances, and practices of resistance to power. In fact, the emphasis on mobility might align de Certeau’s version of space with, say, Yi-Fu Tuan’s definition of this term, which involves mobility, at least potentially. In fact, so far de Certeau’s definitions of space and place are connected to the primary binaries that organize this book, rather than related to the way geographers use these terms.
And then—isn’t it important to pay attention to de Certeau’s repetitions?—there is this summary, which makes things much clearer:
In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs. (117)
Finally, Cresswell’s explication of de Certeau’s version of space and place makes sense: for Cresswell, and for Tuan, place would be a practiced space, a space that contains stories and memories and, although de Certeau would never say this, meaning and human attachment (see Cresswell 16). And, following this moment of clarity, de Certeau refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s distinctions between “‘geometrical’ space,” which geographers would call space, and “‘anthropological’ space,” which geographers would call place—not that de Certeau is necessarily citing Merleau-Ponty with approval. “In our examination of the daily practices that articulate that experience,” de Certeau writes,
the opposition between “place” and “space” will rather refer to two sorts of determinations in stories: the first, a determination through objects that are ultimately reducible to the being-there of something dead, the law of a “place” . . . the second, a determination through operations which, when they attributed to a stone, tree, or human being, specify “spaces” by the actions of historical subjects. (118)
Place, for de Certeau (space, for geographers) is, unlike space (place, for geographers), dead, because it has no history and no movement—nothing human or anthropological, in other words: only the law of its own configuration. “Between these two determinations,” he continues,
there are passages back and forth, such as the putting to death (or putting into a landscape) of heroes who transgress frontiers and who, guilty of an offense against the law of the place, best provide its restoration with their tombs; or again, on the contrary, the awakening of inert objects (a table, a forest, a person that plays a certain role in the environment) which, emerging from their stability, transform the place where they lay motionless into the foreignness of their own space. (118)
Such “passages” are the reason I am reading this book and the subject of my current research. How does space become place? For de Certeau, the answer seems to be through stories: that would be the reason for his reference to “heroes” and for his description of “inert objects” coming to life. Narration is the key to that transformation, then: space becomes place—and I’m using those terms the way geographers do, not the way de Certeau does—when stories can be told about it.
Indeed, stories are key to such transformations. They “carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places,” de Certeau writes. “They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces” (118). The forms such play might take are “numberless, fanning out in a spectrum reaching from the putting in place of an immobile and stone-like order . . . to the accelerated succession of actions that multiply spaces” (118). Again one sees the relationship between these terms and the larger binaries that organize de Certeau’s thinking in this book, and I’m really not convinced that his use of these terms (even in reverse) can simply be mapped onto the way geographers use them, but there is some overlap, I think, and perhaps that’s good enough.
The next section of the chapter, “Tours and maps,” distinguishes between stories (a tour, for de Certeau, is a narrative) and descriptions (a map is a visual description). These terms represent “[t]wo poles of experience,” one belonging to “‘ordinary’ culture”—that would be narrative or “tours”—and the other, “maps,” to “scientific discourse” (119). But there appears to be a spectrum between those two poles: “From this angle, we can compare the combination of “tours” and “maps” in everyday stories with the manner in which, over the past five centuries, they have been interlaced and then slowly dissociated in literary and scientific representations of space” (120). Stories about places are clearly aligned with tactics, as de Certeau has defined that term: they are “composed of fragments drawn from earlier stories and fitted together in makeshift fashion (bricolés). In this sense, they shed light on the formation of myths, since they also have the function of founding and articulating spaces” (122-23). The fundamental question, for de Certeau,
is the partition of space that structures it. Everything refers in fact to this differentiation which makes possible the isolation and interplay of distinct spaces. From the distinction that separates a subject from its exteriority to the distinctions that localize objects, from the home (constituted on the basis of the wall) to the journey (constituted on the basis of a geographical “elsewhere” or a cosmological “beyond”), from the functioning of the urban network to that of the rural landscape, there is no spatiality that is not organized by the determination of frontiers. (123)
Stories, de Certeau argues, play a decisive role in the creation of frontiers; they have a “distributive power” and “performative force,” and as a result they establish spaces (123). Where stories are disappearing, he continues,
there is a loss of space: deprived of narrations (as one sees it happen in both the city and the countryside), the group or individual regresses toward the disquieting, fatalistic experience of a formless, indistinct, and nocturnal totality. By considering the role of stories in delimitation, one can see that the primary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits, and as a consequence, to set in opposition, within the closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect (setting and transgressing limits) in such a way as to make the story a sort of “crossword” decoding stencil (a dynamic partitioning of space) whose essential narrative figures seem to be the frontier and the bridge. (123)
Frontiers and bridges—objects that set and transgress limits—are the “essential narrative figures” of the way stories construct spaces; the frontier defines a legitimate space, and the bridge defines that space’s “(alien) exteriority” (126).
But for de Certeau stories also “found” spaces, and “[t]his founding is precisely the primary role of the story. It opens a legitimate theater for practical actions”—social actions, that is, which are both “dangerous and contingent” because they are aligned with tactics, it seems, against strategies (125). A founding story is fragmented and heterogenous; it is miniaturized, because it includes family stories and autobiographies; and it is polyvalent, “because the mixing together of so many micro-stories gives them functions that change according to the groups in which they circulate” (125). For de Certeau, the way founding stories relate to frontiers seems to be their most important function: “A narrative activity, even if it is multiform and no longer unitary, thus continues to develop where frontiers and relations with space abroad are concerned. Fragmented and disseminated, it is continually concerned with marking out boundaries” (125). But frontiers are not simply boundaries. For de Certeau, frontiers are paradoxical: “created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them” (127). In other words, frontiers or boundaries mark differences, but they are also points where those different spaces touch, perhaps even where exchanges between them are possible. “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across,” de Certeau states, suggesting the way that narration can create connections as well as borders. And, finally, in case it wasn’t already clear, “in this focalizing enunciation”—and remember the importance of the word “enunciation” in this book as a term that is aligned with tactics of resistance—“space appears once more as a practiced place” (130).
And with the end of that chapter, I stopped reading. The rest of The Practice of Everyday Life is focused on language, particularly reading as a form of tactics, and on belief—not topics that are related to my current work. As my supervisors have told me, the point of reading for comprehensive examinations is to focus on what is related to one’s project. Did reading The Practice of Everyday Life make a contribution to my research? Yes, it did. As confusing and sometimes frustrating as de Certeau’s poetic prose and associative style of argument can be, the notion of walking as a form of resistance is useful to my work, as are the notion of haunted places and the distinction between space and place that de Certeau works out in the chapter on “Spatial Stories.” In fact, that chapter might have been the most important part of this book for me—surprisingly more important than the chapter on walking in the city—and that suggests how important it is to read beyond what I might think will be important. Yes, I realize that by skipping the chapters on reading and belief I might be missing out on other valuable insights, but I can always come back to The Practice of Everyday Life later on. Besides, as I’m sure you will agree, this summary is quite long enough as it is. The Practice of Everyday Life is going to play an important part in the conference paper I am about to write on space and place in walking pilgrimages, and that’s reason enough to have read it.
Works Cited
Cresswell, Tim. Place: An Introduction. 2nd edition. Wiley Blackwell, 2015.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall, U of California P, 1984.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.
